The road to recovery: Financial resilience and mental health in post-apartheid South Africa.

Following the post-apartheid era in South Africa, global economic hardships and financial shocks have forced most households to endure various mental and psychological stresses.. This has hindered the achievement of Sustainable Development Goal 3 (SDG-3)-good health and wellbeing-prompting policymakers and academics to search for remedies to mitigate such stresses. Highlighting resilience as a means of improving wellbeing, this paper focuses on financial resilience and constructs an index using a multidimensional framework to investigate its association with mental health disorders. Using the South Africa National Income Dynamic Study alongside several robust estimation techniques, we uncover a negative association between financial resilience and mental health disorders among South Africans. More specifically, financial resilience is associated with an approximately 37% decrease in the occurrence of mental health disorders. The results also reveal disparities in the correlation between financial resilience and mental health disorders across different subgroups. Non-Whites (especially Blacks), urban dwellers, and male household heads are shown to most strongly experience the depression-reducing effect of financial resilience. This paper also shows that life satisfaction and household expenditure mediate the relationship between financial resilience and mental wellbeing. Toward the end of this paper, we discuss the implications of our results and offer some policy recommendations.

Multidimensional Energy Poverty and Mental Health: Micro-Level Evidence from Ghana.

Regardless of growing interest and awareness of the effect of energy poverty on mental health, studies on this linkage have mainly relied on unidimensional measures of energy poverty with much concentration on advanced economies. Employing a two-wave socioeconomic survey, we analyzed the impact of multidimensional energy poverty on mental health in Ghana. We found energy poverty to heighten the chances of being mentally unhealthy. Using prices of liquefied petroleum gas and electricity as instruments for multidimensional energy poverty, we found that a rise in energy deprivation is associated with a 0.562-, 1.494- and 1.867-fold increase in the odds of being mildly, moderately and severely depressed, respectively. Among the indicators of multidimensional energy poverty, a deprivation in household appliance ownership (refrigerator ownership), recorded the highest impact on the depression levels of household heads. We concluded by urging policymakers to adopt a holistic approach in solving issues of energy poverty where simultaneous attention is given to all the dimensions of energy poverty since they collectively have detrimental effects on mental health, especially in a developing country setting.

Social capital is associated with improved subjective well-being of older adults with chronic non-communicable disease in six low- and middle-income countries.

BACKGROUND: Non-communicable diseases (NCDs) are increasingly contributing to the morbidity and mortality burden of low and-middle income countries (LMIC). Social capital, particularly participation has been considered as a possible protective factor in the prevention and management of chronic conditions. It is also largely shown to have a negative effect on the well-being of patients. The current discourse on the well-being of individuals with NCDs is however focused more on a comparison with those with no NCDs without considering the difference between individuals with one chronic condition versus those with multiple chronic conditions (MCC). METHOD AND OBJECTIVE: We employed a multinomial logit model to examine the effect of social capital, particularly social participation, on the subjective well-being (SWB) of older adults with single chronic condition and MCC in six LMIC. FINDINGS: Social capital was associated with increased subjective well-being of adults in all the six countries. The positive association between social capital and subjective well-being was higher for those with a single chronic condition than those with multiple chronic conditions in India and South Africa. Conversely, an increase in the likelihood of having higher subjective well-being as social capital increased was greater for those with multiple chronic conditions compared to those with a single chronic condition in Ghana. DISCUSSION: The findings suggest that improving the social capital of older adults with chronic diseases could potentially improve their subjective well-being. This study, therefore, provides valuable insights into potential social determinants of subjective well-being of older adults with chronic diseases in six different countries undergoing transition. Additional research is needed to determine if these factors do in fact have causal effects on SWB in these populations.